Martial Swing

It’s no surprise that Busby Berkeley’s most visually eruptive musical, “The Gang’s All Here” (playing at Film Forum April 20-26), is a wartime movie (it was released in 1943). Although it’s Berkeley’s first color film, its opening is as black as death, and the riotous palette that follows evokes both dreams and hallucinations. The chirpy action involves no greater aggression than Carmen Miranda’s lipsticky kisses, but the story, about the hectic romance of a soldier headed for combat (James Ellison) and a lonely showgirl (Alice Faye), gives rise to wonders of erotic delirium (complete with gigantic bananas). Berkeley’s signature scans of serried ranks—whether of chorus girls on a beach or of Benny Goodman’s suited-up swingers—have a free, vertiginous swoop reminiscent of slow-motion aeronautics. At the moment that bebop and Abstract Expressionism were coming to the fore in New York, these Hollywood hysterics reflected, in gaudy kaleidoscopic paroxysms, the conjoined chaos of sex and death that defied direct representation in any art form. ♦